if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)
by The Scarlett Ribbon
Summary: no one walks out of a war with clean hands. hermione, draco and the 8th year fic literally no one asked for
1. been walking through a world gone dark

**title: if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)**

**chapter title: i've been walking through a world gone dark**

**summary: no one walks out of a war with clean hands. hermione, draco and the 8****th**** year fic literally no one asked for. **

**dedication: HP, first love always. going to spend my whole life searching for another story i will love as much as i did this one.**

* * *

_if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)_

* * *

She has imagined this moment a hundred thousand times since the moment she walked out of her childhood home forever. The Australian sun is baking overhead and Hermione can practically see the waves of heat rising from the tarmac roads, can smell the burning tires of the taxi cab. Her hair is frazzling in the sun, the way it always does. Reaching in her handbag for a scrunchie, she shoves it up in a knot on top of her head, ignoring the press of her wand against her wrist where it is hidden up her sleeve.

It is the first time in over a year that she has been alone.

_They're safe, _she tells herself. _They're safe, they're fine, there is nothing to fear anymore. _

It is a mantra Hermione has been repeating to herself for weeks now and yet, while her mind is rational her body cannot accept what she knows to be true, what she has seen with her own eyes _(the dull thunk of Voldemort's body hitting the floor,_ _Death Eaters fleeing, Harry alive alive alive -_)

"Y'all right, love?"

She uncurls herself and places her hands flat on the sticky, pleather seats. "Fine. It's just been a long flight. A long day."

_A long year. _

"Come a long way?" he asks.

"From London," Hermione replies, mouth dry. The cab is slowing now and the line of quayside houses are becoming more and more distinct.

"That's thirty, sweetheart."

She hands him the cash – and how strange it is, after a year on the run, a year of not paying for anything at all – and stands on the pavement on an unfamiliar street, in an unknown city, her hands shaking and her heart in her throat.

She has imagined it a hundred thousand times, standing on the threshold – how the door will open wide and her parents will sweep her up in their arms, overwhelmed, joyful. It is a childish daydream from dark, dire days, a pretty lie to keep herself going in the awful, quiet moments when it felt like there was no going on at all.

This, she knows, is how it will really turn out; Hermione pushes open the white picket gate and walks across the short yard, ascends the steps and knocks quietly on the front door of Wendell and Monica Wilkes.

Her father opens the door and he looks at her without knowing her. There is no recognition in his brown eyes, the eyes he passed on to her and it is the millionth tiny papercut in this entire year of hurts. She has imagined this moment but never been able to prepare herself for how it will feel to have a parent look at her like she is a stranger.

"May I help you?" her father asks politely.

Down the street, children are playing football in the road. The smell of the sea is ripe on the air, salty-sharp and so, so unfamiliar. Home is not an Australian shore; home is the three-bed in Hertfordshire with yellow roses in the front garden and diamond paned windows.

Hermione breathes and lets her wand slip into her hand.

"_Remember,_" she whispers.

He does.

* * *

"Pack up your things," Lucius hisses, his hair – always so impeccably groomed – a wild tangle of white blond down his back. "We're leaving. Now."

It is dark outside, but darker in the drawing room, in Draco's childhood home where for a year a monster has lived. He doesn't feel safe in the Manor anymore. None of them do, but it is a legacy and there is nothing more important to the Malfoy's than what they have inherited and what they themselves will leave behind.

Draco does not move.

"Narcissa," his father snaps.

She hesitates, her hand flexing on his shoulder and he is filled with a dread too pronounced to name – that this is it, the end of everything, that she will leave him.

"No," his mother says quietly.

"The Ministry is coming," Lucius says, as though they cannot comprehend the magnitude of the situation.

"Yes," she agrees. "We knew they would."

In the weeks since the Battle of Hogwarts the Ministry has been scrambling to reassemble itself, to weed out the Death Eaters and the spies and the informants. It has taken some time to elect a temporary leader, to reshuffle and reorganise, but the hunt has begun in earnest now.

"Then what are you standing around for? We must leave immediately. Tonight – this very moment! _Narcissa._"

"And go where? If we run we will be exiles forever, Lucius."

"Better exiled than in Azkaban. This will all blow over in a matter of years. The Malfoy name –"

_The Malfoy name, _Draco thinks, the beginning of – of _resentment _beginning to curl beneath his rib cage, hard and angry. It has always been about the Malfoy name; the expectations, the legacy, the blood that makes them and their small corner or the world so much better than the rest of it.

_You told me we were the better breed of wizard, _he almost says. _Look what we've done to the world we thought belonged to us alone. _

"Go, father," he says, speaking for the first time. The fire in the grate is flickering low, but he can still see the shadows under Lucius's eyes, the unshaven face, the bloodless skin. They still have the same pointed face, the same pale, glittering eyes. "I will not stop you."

"Come with me, Draco. Both of you, _come with me_."

It is uncomfortable to see his once-proud father beg, but it is a sight Draco has grown used to these past two years. His all-powerful father is nothing but a man, after all; and not, it turns out, a very good one.

"_Draco!_" Lucius hisses, one final time as the pops of apparition travel from outside and he cannot, he cannot step forward, cannot take his father's hand.

The Aurors – what is left of them – burst into the house mere seconds after Lucius Malfoy, scion of that old house, Death Eater, murder, _coward _apparates to merlin-knows-where, leaving wife and only son behind.

Narcissa's hand is trembling on his shoulder, but she does not move. Instead she pressed her lips very softly to the back of his hair, light as the first snowflake in a winter storm.

"Be strong, my son," she whispers close to his ear, as the Aurors flood in. "Be brave."

* * *

There is crying and shouting – her father weeps and her mother rages – but at the end of it all there is tea in the kitchen.

"How could you?" Jean Granger asks, for the hundredth time. Hermione thinks it is not so much incomprehension as it is a stubborn disbelief. "_How could you, _Hermione?"

"I had to keep you safe."

Calmly, she runs through her list of justifications and ignores the chamomile tea steaming gently in front of her. It is simple, she explains. I was a target and so were you.

Her parents are logical people and in the end they accept her explanations. They claim to accept her apologies. In the silent moments, though – at dinner when the conversation hitches, pauses, runs out; in that startled moment after she enters a room unexpectedly; when they think she is out of the house and cannot hear them – in the silent moments, Hermione watches and listens and begins to understand the real cost of what she has done, the real price she has paid to both protect her mother and father and keep her best friend alive.

"You didn't even ask," her father said, when the first explanation came out.

"You wouldn't have agreed," Hermione had replied. "I had to protect you. It was the only way."

"And if you'd been hurt – if you'd – if you'd," he cannot say the words, struggles to articulate the primal fear that lives in every parents bone marrow. "What then? It'd have been like you never existed."

She looks down at her hands, vaguely ashamed. At the time it had been her masterstroke – only she could break the spell she had cast, a memory charm all of her own invention. Not even torture could've broken it. Not even her death.

"I thought," Hermione tries, stumbles over the words, "it would be – kinder. If I died. You wouldn't have to – it wouldn't hurt you."

"That, darling," he tells her gently, so gently it hurts worse than her mother's screaming, "was not your decision to make."

Now, she swallows around the lump in her throat, face pressed against her knees, feet bare in the sand. Was it the right decision? It felt like it was the _only _decision at the time, the only one she could make. Maybe her parents will forgive her for it in time, but trust will never come easily between them again.

* * *

There are trials and trials and trials. There are endless lists of the dead. Draco didn't choose Voldemort, not really, not for true – his father made the choice for him years and years ago when he first took the Dark Mark onto his skin and into his soul and failed, over and over, to be a perfect servant, but still. But still.

Everyone loves a scapegoat.

He's spent too many years at school swaggering about the place, tormenting Potter, backing Umbridge, looking down his nose at the other kids and calling them words that will be unforgiveable in this brave new post-Voldemort world.

He scrapes through his own trial – helped by his youth, his unconfirmed kill count, Potter's testimony.

"Malfoy," Potter says, "is a bully and a coward but not a killer, as far as I can tell. He doesn't have the heart for it."

A few years ago, he would have taken that as a grave insult. A Malfoy could not afford to show weakness, not to anyone – his father has drummed that into him over and over for as long as Draco can remember. But Potter looks at him not with contempt but something undefinable in those bottle-green eyes Draco has hated so much these past seven years.

_Boy-Who-Lived, _they whispered in the halls of Hogwarts. _Triwizard Champion. Chosen One. _

Draco has been losing to him ever since they stepped on the Hogwarts Express all those years ago, ever since he extended his hand and got a scorned _I think I can tell the wrong sort for myself, thanks _in return.

He thought Potter was turning his nose up, snubbing him – no one with class or sense would overlook a Malfoy for a Weasley, or a _Granger, _he'd thought. No one would choose a blood traitor and a mudblood over a _Malfoy. _

Now he lies in his bed – under house arrest rather than being thrown into a prison cell – staring at the dark ceiling and Draco remembers those first words. _The wrong sort, _Potter had called him, eleven-years-old and so skinny it was surprising.

The Dark Mark on his arm has gone quiet, dormant, but it still feels like a brand upon his skin. It is nothing to be proud of. It is not how he wants to be remembered.

* * *

_tbc_

* * *

**notes: i have not written hp in like ten years but this has been sitting in my drafts for ages **

**notes2: they are **_**talking **_**to me again and it's wonderful**

**notes3: let's hope this lightning strike continues, i'm quite excited for what i could do with this early otp now i've grown up**

**notes4: hp i missed you so much**


	2. no idea where my heart could have been

**title: if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)**

**chapter title: no idea where my heart could have been**

**summary: no one walks out of a war with clean hands. hermione, draco and the 8****th**** year fic literally no one asked for.**

**dedication: moirail, because no one else screams about HP with me the way you do. and also because no one else could ever have made me see anything to admire in pansy parkinson**

* * *

_if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)_

* * *

Truth be told, Draco is not sure what to do with his barely-awarded freedom.

When the Dark Lord crashed into the floor of the Great Hall and then later, when the Aurors came bursting through the wards at Malfoy Manor, he fully expected to be incarcerated with the rest of the Death Eaters they've managed to take alive. His mother is serving time, after all – and she was never even a real Death Eater, just the wife of one.

"It's alright," she'd said, touching his face so gently before she stepped forward to face the judgement of the Wizengamot. "They cannot punish Lucius, so one of us will have to do. I'm the adult. I made my choices, my son."

"I made them too," he'd argued. "Mother –"

"You were a child," Narcissa said. "You are still just a child and had you been only my son, you would never have been touched by this war. I want you to have a future, Draco."

He spends his summer haunting Malfoy Manor, drifting between the empty rooms and trying to remember how it felt before the Dark Lord set up residence. He cannot enter the drawing room, cannot sleep at night without remembering how this paradise of his childhood was polluted with fear.

It still is.

He scours every room, the walls and the floor with a cleaning charm he finds in one of the books in the library. The room and the air is full of soap suds, but it's not enough. He can still hear Charity Burbage screaming, hear the crash of her body onto the dining room table, the soft sibilant slither of Nagini snaking over its surface towards her.

He can still see Luna Lovegood in the dark basement, trying to keep Ollivander cheerful. In all the times he'd daydreamed about – about beating Potter _finally _it had never looked like that, Bellatrix cackling with ecstasy and Granger screaming and screaming and screaming –

Draco cannot sleep.

* * *

"When are you coming back?"

It's Harry who has phoned her, static tripping down the line between time zones and oceans. They're not sure floopowder would work across such a long distance and it gets tiring to wait for owls. His voice steadies her, steadies something that knocked loose the moment she lifted her parents memory charm.

Hermione tucks the phone between her shoulder and chin, looking out the window of the spare bedroom towards the beach. "Soon, I think. My parents plan on staying for a while longer, but I think I've almost had my fill of Australia. The heat is – well. You can imagine what it's done to my hair."

Harry laughs, but not meanly. It must be very late or very early in England, she's lost track of the time difference honestly, but she yearns to be there as much as she yearns to stay away forever. She wants to be everywhere and nowhere, wants to crawl out of her own skin most days. But she could never leave Harry.

"London is grey and rainy," he offers and she can hear the slightest of smiles in his voice.

"A classic British summer then," she replies, twirling the phone cord around her finger. "I suppose I've missed Wimbledon."

"Next month, I think. I never did get tennis. But we – we could go, if you're back by then. Pretend to be muggles for the day, just you and me."

She bites her lip, wanting and not wanting to know. "And…And Ron and Ginny?"

Harry is quiet for a long time. "I don't think they'd be interested in it right now," he says. "Things are – well, you know how it was before you left. It's not got better really. Mrs Weasley is trying, but Ron is just – he's so angry. Ginny is too, but she'll talk to me about it. Or she'll take her feelings out on the orchard on the days she doesn't want to talk."

Ron has always worn his anger close to the surface, Hermione thinks later, when they've said their goodbyes. Most of the Weasley's have. Most of the time she's risen to meet it, but she cannot rise to meet this. Grief is different; Hermione cannot out-shout him, cannot needle at Ron until they blow up, sulk and apologise to each other the way they always did in school.

She misses him, his physical presence and the boy he was before the war. The two weeks before she came out to Australia were painful, full of slammed doors and awkward silences between all three of them – there are splinters between them and Ron now.

It might be nice, Hermione thinks, to slip away from it all for a day with her best friend. No war, no loss, no death – just the people they are in the long summers away from Hogwarts, a boy and a girl who have never felt the touch of magic. They have grown up, the two of them, with a foot in each world and if she wanted to, Hermione knows she could disappear into her old life, the girl she might have been, who gets her A-Levels and goes to Oxford.

It makes for a pretty daydream, on the nights when she wakes with flashes of green light behind her eyelids and Harry's motionless body hanging in Hagrid's arms still featuring in her dreams.

* * *

"You could stay here with us. Hermione. You don't have to leave."

She smiles at her father over the cereal – cornflakes with warm milk. There were never sugary cereals in her house growing up, no Coco Pops or Frosted Shreddies, just toast and marmalade and low-fat yogurt. It's a familiar scene at the breakfast table, but it does not feel like home anymore.

"Yes, I do." Her mother cannot bear to look at her. Neither of them will acknowledge it, but it's been three weeks and she is only hurting them by staying. "It's time to go home."

"Is home not where we are?"

Hermione bites her lip, twists her hands into anxious knots beneath the table. Outside the only sound is the ocean and seagulls and her mother chatting with the neighbour in low murmurs. They could be happy here, she thinks, in this land of sunshine and warm ocean.

"The home of my childhood," she says, "always. But I've not been a child for a long time, Dad. I just – hid that from you, I suppose."

"You hid too much from us."

"I compartmentalised," Hermione decides, because that's as much as she can give him.

And when did that start? When Voldemort came back? When the Death Eaters went on a rampage at the Quidditch World Cup and Malfoy sneered at them all to keep her out of sight, because didn't they know she was no different in their eyes than the poor muggles floating over the camp site?

Or was it earlier than that? Dementors lose at the edges of the grounds, mysterious attacks that left students petrified, Voldemort making a play for the Philosopher's stone? Was it when the troll came into the girls bathroom and she realised this brand new world was dangerous?

Or was it when she was so homesick and lonely in that first term of her first year that she thought she would die and wanted to spare them her suffering? Was that when she neatly cleaved her own life in two?

Harry does it too, she knows – swings between being the Boy Who Lived and the boy in the cupboard every year, except they are the same person when it counts. Hermione Granger, muggle and Hermione Granger, witch, are two quite different people. The latter has done things the former could never have imagined doing; found a spine of steel and a ruthless streak a mile wide where the people she loves are concerned. And maybe that streak was always there, under the surface – maybe she'd have channelled it into one cause or another, but –

The bird-boned inquisitive child she was in her father's eyes is gone and there is no more pretending otherwise.

_I left them behind, _Hermione thinks with a sinking heart. _I ran away into another world and didn't let them see it or me. I hid behind myself to keep them safe and now the act is over they don't know who I am. _

Hermione finishes her cornflakes in silence. Later, when she books her flight out of there and back to cloudy English skies, neither of her parents try and make her stay.

* * *

All his friends have gone, except for Pansy. She's annoying and stubborn and has a vicious streak a mile wide if you get on the wrong side of her, but her best quality is that she's loyal to the bone. Blaise can fuck off to the other side of the world without a backwards glance and Theo can bury himself in the sand without a care for anyone else, but Pansy –

Draco and Pansy grew up together, squabbling at the same tea-parties and Christmas balls, the same weddings and funerals. He's known her name for almost as long as he's known his own and that _matters. _

She's cut her hair short, a severe bob that falls to her jaw and dark eyes narrow at him across the room. He likes that look when it's trained at some other poor sod.

"Don't be pathetic," Pansy snaps, kicking off her heels and throwing herself elegantly into the nearest chair, pale legs dangling over the arms. "You're a Malfoy, you don't _mope._"

Draco is lying on the library floor, books and a tumbler of firewhisky empty beside him. Day drinking is probably not an admirable quality, but after weeks and weeks of silence and awful memories chasing themselves across his eyelids, Draco doesn't care too much. What, exactly, has he done in his whole life so far that is admirable?

"Why are you in such a cheery mood."

"I'm _not,_" she sneers. "Our whole world has gone to rubble and you're just lying here like a useless sack of potatoes. Narcissa would be so disappointed in you if she knew you were showing as much spine as a snail."

"And I suppose you're doing better."

"I'm not wallowing," Pansy points out, leaning over the snag the remaining firewhisky out of his reach. "Look, we lost Draco. We were going to lose even if the Dark Lord won, he'd never have been satisfied just with killing all the muggleborns. Nothing was ever going to be enough. It's better this way."

He's not arguing. He just doesn't know what to do next, has never been good at picking himself up and starting over, doesn't know if he even can or should after what he's done. Maybe he is just a kid, maybe he didn't choose to get in as far as he did, but he still chose to parrot his father year after year after year.

He is – he is _complicit. _

"I'm glad the Dark Lord is dead," he says. Every day since Voldemort's return has been a nightmare, even if he didn't see it at first. "He was a rot and I helped spread it through the world, Pansy. We all did."

She sighs, tilts her head back at the ceiling so he can see the long line of her pale throat. "Things are going to change. They _are_ changing. If the Ministry has its way, all the old families will be pushed out and punished for this, forever. We can't let them shut us out, Draco."

"Why? It's not as if we've done any good."

"We've done plenty of good," Pansy snaps, outraged. "Think how much money your family has given to St Mungo's over the years, they don't heal only purebloods there. We've supported local businesses instead of just relying of Diagon Alley, brokered peace with the other wizarding nations, preserved dragon species that were threatened with extinction! We are not just this war."

For the first time in their shared lives, he cannot find the words to explain himself. Yes, their small corner of the magical world has done its fair share to strengthen and support innovation, but it's also their small corner of it that is solely responsible for tearing it apart. They got it wrong, somewhere.

"None of that matters anymore," he murmurs, unfocused eyes on the ceiling. "This is our legacy, Pansy. This is how they are going to remember us."

"It will be if you don't buck up and do something."

He rolls over, shoves his sleeve up and exposes the black lines of the Dark Mark etched into his skin. It's an ugly thing, really. When he was a child it had looked like a badge of honour on Lucius's arm, but on his own it just feels like a branding.

"What exactly do you think I can do?" Draco demands of her. "Look at it. Look at me. You think anyone out there is going to listen to me when I've got this carved into me? It will never come off!"

_I am marked forever._

Pansy scowls, eyebrows pinching together and it's hideous that even with her face scrunched up like that she still manages to be pretty. It's one of the things her mother cultivated in her so carefully – how to use her beauty and how to dig her heels in to get what she wants. She's a survivor, first and foremost, has always managed to tread water instead of drowning.

"Leave me alone, Pansy."

"Fine!" The way her nose tilts up into the air is intimately familiar. "Fine. I can't talk to you when you're like this, but we're not done Draco. When I come back, I expect you to be done with this disgusting display of day-drinking and feeling sorry for yourself."

The sound of her heels tap-tapping across the polished wooden floorboards until she apparates with a sharp _crack! _echoes and echoes and echoes when she's gone.

It's not that he wanted company. But the manor suddenly feels very empty without Pansy in it. Draco tips his head back and reaches for the decanter of firewhisky.

* * *

The last of the rubble has been cleared away. Behind her, the castle is whole again – the windows are repaired, the marble staircase looks as if it was never broken – but there are things even magic cannot conceal. There are deep hollows in the ground, places where the giants tore up the earth with their carelessness and blackened stone where flames licked up the side of the castle.

There are graves – endless graves of white stone at the far edge of the lake. Not all of their dead are buried here, but there are still too many to count.

_This was a school, _Minerva thinks, with a little despair. _This was a school and it was supposed to be safe. _

There are some in the Ministry who didn't want to see Hogwarts repaired.

"Let it stand as a reminder," she remembers someone saying, "of pureblood violence and how it will tear this world apart!"

They want to make this place – her school, Albus's legacy – a memorial. They want scars on display, every new generation cowed by evil and what it had cost to defeat it. Minerva has put her foot down.

"Hogwarts is a school," she'd said, repressed fury in her voice that she knew every member of the new Wizengamot had heard. "First and foremost. It was before the war and it will be afterwards."

She'd meant it – let them build their own memorials and preach about bloodshed – but here, in these halls, the truest victory Minerva can think of is to rebuild. There is too much anger in the magical community. She will not deny it's a powerful tool in the right hands at the right time, but she has only ever seen it used for destruction.

_Useful for burning down a brutal regime, _she thinks, _but not for peace. _

Maybe that's the problem – those grieving, wounded souls don't want peace, but punishment instead. She thinks of Albus in his study, half-moon spectacles perched precariously on his crooked nose. He would not let children be raised in a world of ashes.

Neither will she.

* * *

_tbc_

* * *

**notes: i am so glad i'm writing this now and not ten years ago **

**notes2: i've never written McGonagall in my life and i loved it? where did her voice come from? **

**notes3: you guys seriously don't understand how much i have missed potter. won't reveal my old penname because good lord i wrote some awful tripe in my early teens but it's really a relief to have their voices back in my head. i hope they stay for a good long while. i have some **_**plans **_**for this. **


	3. the water creeps to my chest

**title: if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)**

**chapter title: the water creeps to my chest**

**summary: no one walks out of a war with clean hands. hermione, draco and the 8****th**** year fic literally no one asked for.**

**dedication: tina, who will never read this but whom for the last three years has been the only person at work i can nerd with about hp. she is the best pal, you guys. i'm gonna be so sad not working together anymore.**

* * *

_if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)_

* * *

It's a cloudy, humid day in late June when Hermione returns to England. She's tired, hours and hours of plane journeys curling in the spaces between her bones full of screaming toddlers, manic parents and fitful, nightmare laden sleeps. The whole way between Sydney and Singapore, Hermione had been afraid of falling asleep properly, afraid she would wake screaming from dreams she'd never be able to explain to the other passengers.

_I lost everything, _she almost wants to scream at them – though of course, it's not their fault, not their fault at all and would she really want them to know there are some out there still, always will be, who will want them dead or subjugated, certainly afraid, just for the fact that there is no magic running through their veins?

And she has not lost everything. Not at once. There was an hour or so, when she waited in the castle with the dead, for the final blow to come and she could not find Harry, not anywhere and she knew, she _knew –_

_No, _Hermione tells herself, as the landing gear comes down, as the plane glides to a smooth stop at the end of the runway. _No. Do not relive that here. _

Still, the fact remains: for an hour or so, she had lost her best friend to the darkness of the Forbidden Forest and she is still not entirely sure she has got him back. Now she has lost her parents twice over.

There are other losses of course, big and small and too numerous to name. She feels the weight of them all; here, in the middle of Heathrow and surrounded by indifferent muggles, it is too much to look at directly.

"Hermione!" a familiar – _beloved _– voice calls and she whirls, scanning the crowd with frantic eyes. The past year has taught her how to find them quickly in a crowd, always searching with an edge of panic pressing out from her ribcage.

She is in the circle of Harry's arms before she even registers her feet moving.

"Oh, I _missed _you," she breathes into the jut of his collarbone and he laughs, because all these years and all these summers apart and she's never actually said it to him. She'd written weekly long letters, sent him snacks and care packages and even a birthday cake that memorable year the Dursley's enforced that ridiculous diet on the mammoth cousin she'd like to slap – but had never said the actual words.

"I missed you too," he says, arms tight around her. He smells the way he always has since first year – like broom polish and spearmint toothpaste and she inhales it in greedily, the first time she's felt at home since sixth year, probably.

She has always built her home in other people. This is where they differ. Harry loves deeply and loyally, but he's still so self-contained, still the skinny boy she'd met when they when they were eleven with the shadow of the cupboard in his eyes.

Hermione pulls back and looks at him, tugs at a rebellious lock of inky hair. "It's getting so long."

"Ginny likes it," he says, laughing a little. "She says it makes me look dangerous."

"Hmmm." She is carefully non-committal, tucking his hair behind his ear and stepping away to pick up her suitcase. Of course most of her stuff is in her loyal beaded bag, but it would look odd to travel so far without hold luggage.

"How is she?"

Harry falls into step with her easily, steering her towards the exit. "Not great, honestly. I don't know what to say to her, there's nothing that will make it better. Maybe you could talk to her about it, you're good at feelings."

"I can sympathise, but I can't empathise Harry. I've never lost anyone that close to me."

(a lie, of sorts – she can remember how it felt, that crushing moment when she realised that Harry was nowhere to be seen, that he'd slipped away like fading stardust, that while she held Ron in her arms on the floor of the Great Hall he was walking towards his death)

"Just be – patient," she says, trying to believe the words coming out of her own mouth. Outside the air smells like jet fuel and the heat that comes off the tarmac in soft waves, a smell particular to summer and the muggle world she only half belongs in. There are tears building in her eyes, whether grief or weariness, she's not entirely sure, but Hermione blinks them back stubbornly the way she has been doing for hours days weeks –

It's ridiculous, this constant battle against the moisture in her eyes; how badly her spine wants to collapse in on itself, let this howl of misery in her ribcage _out. _

She cannot.

Not with Harry still battered from his brush with death, not with Ron still bleeding out from the ragged wound that is Fred's absence and Ginny, with her long silences and screaming nightmares.

"I'm glad you're back," Harry says, as they round the corner and prepare to apparate. What goes unsaid; _we need you._

* * *

Hermione does not return to her parent's house, the real one – with the diamond paned windows and the yellow roses that grow every summer, without fail, on a white trellis. Her father loved those roses. He'd pruned them back carefully year after year; Hermione cannot face the sight or the sweet smell of them.

She will always think of it that way now; her parent's house, the house of her childhood, but not the home she grew up in. The way back is barred; she closed it behind her the day she took their memories. Instead she moves into Grimmauld Place and Harry doesn't ask questions, just as Ron, lost in bitter grief, doesn't notice.

He stays over sometimes, when he cannot bear to be at the Burrow – she curls herself around his spine, wraps her arms around him, matches her breath to his – and sometimes this breaches the chasm between them. Sometimes Ron is so far beyond her reach that nothing crosses that ocean of silence.

"Tell me what will help," she murmurs into the skin at the nape of his neck. "What can I – tell me."

"Nothing," Ron whispers back, "Be here."

_I am here, _she wants to shout, _I'm here, you're the one who keeps leaving. _

She and Harry eat breakfast together most mornings, toast and marmalade, orange juice and weak earl grey tea, both of them tactfully ignoring the other's tired eyes and the dark circles which speak of sleepless nights.

She does not know what to do with herself. None of them do; maybe that's the problem.

* * *

Pansy has known Andromeda Black's name all her life. It was a name spoken in whispers at the cocktail parties her mother threw year after year and carefully sidestepped at the famous Black family teas. There was a warning in those whispers; _behave _or you'll end up just like her, cast out and unwanted.

Behave or you could end up doing something unthinkable, like shaming your blood and your name and running off with a muggleborn.

It had seemed such a terrible thing then, to be cast out; blood-traitor. But Pansy has seen truly terrible things since then and knows it was only ever foolishness and fear, a tool to keep the children in-line. If the worst thing she ever does is disappoint her parents, she'll have a clear conscience.

Still. She's never actually met the woman and it's another thing entirely to turn up at her house, unexpected and unwanted, but Pansy is doing it anyway.

_I have faced, _she thinks, as the door opens to reveal a wary, tired face, _scarier things than you. _

Andromeda invites her in for tea with the same icy politeness that Pansy learned at her mother's knee and this – this is a language they both know in their bones.

Pure-bloods and blood-traitors both come from the same place after all.

"Miss Parkinson," Andromeda Black says, chilly as those first winter mornings at Hogwarts, when the floor of the common room stung with the cold, even through her thick stockings. "Won't you have a biscuit?"

* * *

The days pass and keep on passing. It might be June, or possible July – Draco has given up on counting the days – when his Aunt Andromeda steps quietly out of the fireplace and scares the life out of him because she looks, she looks so much like –

"Don't say it," Andromeda says wearily. "She's dead."

Draco picks himself up from the floor, suddenly aware of his dirty hair, his crumpled untucked shirt, the empty decanter of firewhisky lying on its side. She looks like Bellatrix, but she has his mother's expression of disapproval and it sobers him in a way nothing has since the trial.

"She's dead," Andromeda repeats, "and so is my daughter."

"I –"

Words – so many words – lodge in his throat and he cannot think of what to say to this woman, who shares his blood but not his name. In all his life he's only met her twice, quiet occasions when he was very small and Narcissa was not supposed to be seeing her sister.

How on earth can she bear to set foot here?

"Because despite everything, I did love my sisters," she replies and he realises that he spoke aloud. Whoops. He might be drunk; he might be really depressed.

"I don't understand how," he replies, voice scratchy and thick. "How could you still…after everything?"

"Oh, Draco."

She sounds so much like his mother then, steering him towards the closest armchair and settling him down in it with so much gentleness when he deserves the opposite. Her fingers around his wrist brush against the Dark Mark and he flinches.

"I suppose it's different for you," she muses, in a low voice. "You were always an only child. Always alone in this great, empty house. I grew up with Bella and Cissy. We shared blood, but also a childhood and that – that is not so easily forgotten. No matter what happened after."

"But she – she killed –"

"She killed Nymphadora? Yes. Yes." Andromeda breathes raggedly, sinks into an armchair of her own and looks down at her hands, elegant, the same hands that Bellatrix had. How she must hate to look at them.

"I loved my daughter more than anything – more than anyone, even my husband. And I walked away from my entire world for him. I've never regretted it, but love is not turned off like a tap. My parents disowned me, but I still loved them. Cissy could only meet me in shamed secrecy, but I never resented her for not walking away the same way I did. Bella killed my daughter, but I still – she was always my sister. Even now. I mourn them both."

Draco shudders, unable to look at her brittle expression, the way she folds her hands on her knee to keep them, he suspects, from curling into fists. The parlour is silent and still, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.

"Why have you come?" he asks at last.

"You're my nephew, aren't you?" Andromeda says wearily. "Miss Parkinson came to see me last week. She seems to think you are having some trouble with guilt."

He could almost laugh. Bloody, _bloody _Pansy and her interfering little face. Imagining that little tete-a-tete is the best thought he's had in weeks.

"She came for tea," Andromeda adds. "Uninvited, I might add. She's got a lot of nerve."

"Pansy is a survivor."

"Yes. I got that impression. Sharp girl. She doesn't suffer fools, does she?"

"She never has."

"Hmm. But she played with the baby gamely enough and ate the right amount of biscuits. She'll be alright, whatever happens. I almost didn't like her at first. I didn't want to. Her family never committed one way or the other, just sat it out and waited without getting their hands dirty – Bella may have been wrong but she fought for what she believed in. Say what you will about her, but you can't say she wasn't dedicated. No, there two sides to this war and both sides have lost heavily. I can't stand the ones who haven't lost anything at all."

Andromeda leaned forward. "They will say the war was bigger than us and maybe that's true. But at its heart, it is families like ours that got torn down the middle, which have lost most heavily. The ones who fought against each other no matter the cost. You cannot hold yourself solely responsible for our family's sins, Draco. This started long, long before you were born."

Draco blinks rapidly, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat. "I didn't walk away."

"No. But you were only a boy raised on poison. Who knows what you have chosen if you'd had more time to grow up? I like to think if I'd not met Ted that I would still have chosen to leave, but the fact is I chose to leave only because I loved him, not because I believed my parents were inherently wrong. That came later, with time and a little less ignorance about the world."

The tears come out; he cannot stop them. More than anything, he Draco knows he does not deserve this kindness. He cannot fathom the grace it takes for Andromeda to bestow it, when she has lost so much, from such a young age.

_You have lost too, _a little voice whispers at the back of his head. _You have, you have. _

Andromeda conjures a silk embroidered handkerchief and delicately dabs the wetness away from his cheeks. "You didn't get a chance to choose," she says quietly, the light from the fireplace reflecting in her tired eyes. "If the Dark Lord had won, you never would, but he's gone and so are Bella and all the rest. They were the adults, Draco. Let the poison die with them."

* * *

The letter comes unexpectedly.

The day of Dumbledore's funeral, oh, so long ago it feels now – Hermione had known she would never have her seventh year. There might be a way to take the exams, if they were victorious, but she had known there would be no coming back to school for them.

Except –

"I'm not going back," Ron says shortly, throwing an identical letter down on the kitchen table and knocking over a half-drunk glass of pumpkin juice. Hermione watches as it spills over the table, as it soaks the parchment and the ink runs in emerald streams.

He gets up and storms out of the kitchen; a few moments later, they hear the front door slam. Harry, looking very tired, flicks his wand at the spilled juice and it vanishes.

"What do you think?" he asks. "Worth considering?"

"None of us got to take our NEWTS," Hermione says softly, gaze still trained on the kitchen door as if she can call Ron back. "I think it would be good to have them."

"It won't be the same."

No, it won't. She tries to imagine going back to class in the same place where so many of her school mates and their relatives have so recently died, where Fred's body lay on the floor of the Great Hall, where Voldemort had every intention of wiping them out and declaring victory. Hogwarts, she thinks, is no longer untouched. The enemies were inside the walls.

"Maybe it's time for something different," she says, trying for lightness. "Imagine what it will be like getting through the year without someone trying to kill you."

Harry laughs and rubs at his tired eyes. "A peaceful year! Merlin, that could be nice."

"I think we've earned it by now."

He nods, reaches for another bit of toast but the laughter is fading from his expression already. "I'll think about it," Harry promises quietly. "I'm pretty sure you've already made your mind up, yeah?"

"I – I haven't decided anything yet. Not for certain."

If she leaves, what will become of her and Ron? Something inside her knows that the fledgling relationship they started will not survive both his grief and her absence. It is too much, too raw –

For so long she has been the one holding them all together.

"Hermione," Harry says, very seriously. "You don't need to put us first anymore. If this is what you want, you should do it. Don't hold yourself back for us."

She looks down at her hands, hands that have cursed and shielded and never trembled, not once, in the face of all that death. All that fury.

"I thought it would be different than this," she whispers. "Winning. I thought – we'd be happy."

Harry sets his letter down carefully, as haunted as she feels. "I guess," he says, so, so quietly. "No one walks out of a war with clean hands."

And that's the problem, isn't it? The thing that history books cannot tell; that the end of a war feels less like a party and more like the aftermath of a tsunami, where the life you had before lies in tatters beneath the surface and you struggle to keep your head above the water. What do you go back to when the flood clears? Who do you try and save from the wreckage?

From his tired eyes and tired hands, she knows Harry understands.

_It's okay, _he seems to say, _if the person you save is you._

* * *

_tbc_

* * *

**notes: sacked off my toxic office job and wondering what to do with my life**

**notes2: was planning to go to asia this spring but you know. corona virus happened. **

**notes3: blame sarsaparillia for my love of pansy, it never would have happened if not for her spamming me with headcanons and also she writes brilliant HP fic**


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